Our Annuals are designed to give value year after year – as an example, I give this flashback to May 2008 from my livejournal…
Many of us remember, and were inspired by Pete Fenlon’s wonderful maps for the Middle Earth Roleplaying Game. Today, Pete is Chairman and Studio Director at Mayfair Games. In January 2008, with Pete’s permission we released a style pack for making maps in his style as part of the Cartographer’s Annual 2008.
Steve Townshend produced this beautiful map in the Pete Fenlon style.
It uses only specially designed vector symbols combined with CC3’s effects to get the right look.
Style packs are preconfigured so that if you select a tool (for example, rivers, roads and terrain), it looks right for the map style. To create a forest, you just select the forest draw tool, click points for the border, and it does this, adding random tree tops and edge trees.
You building up mountain ranges by selecting a symbol, then placing. They are selected randomly from a collection of symbols. So this was one click per mountain, and the mess at the bottom is a mountain cursor. You can tab through random styles if you don’t like the current mountain at the cursor.
The distinctive ridges are also built up of symbols. On the left, with CC3 effects off, on the right, with them on.
Although the styles definitely make it easier to create maps such as these, Steve Townshend demonstrates that the human touch is still required to get an aesthetically pleasing map – style packs just make it easier to get the desired effect.
You can download the map in CC3 format here.
Shame when you download the map that all the png symbols just come up as X’s so the thing looks pretty ugly, compared to what you’ve got here.
@Arbanax – For some reason I remember this as a vector style. If it’s got PNGs, you’d need the Annual Style to see it – sorry. I’ll try to find some better images.
hey that would be great Simon as those old style maps were awesome. I used to by Merp stuff just because I loved those maps.
Thanks for the good words, Simon! I’ve been so out of the loop lately, I didn’t see this post until today. Need to get in some good solid CC3 time; it’s been far too long since my last map.